Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19th, 1809. He was orphaned at an early age and subsequently entered the home of his guardians John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. He never was actually adopted by the Allans, although Poe added the name Allan to his own. Poe was brought up in a fairly well-to-do household with the Allans, who paid for his boarding school as a child. At the age of 17, Poe matriculated at the University of Virginia on February 14th. He only spent one term there, as he had amounted a debt of around $2500 dollars (Symons). With his Father refusing to cover his debt, Edgar enlisted in the Army, and won an appointment to West Point. He was dismissed for breaking the rules, as well as drinking heavily. His aunt, Mrs. Clemm of Baltimore, took him in, and in 1836 he married his young cousin Virginia Clemm. Meanwhile, he launched his literary career with his first publication of verses in Boston and New York. For a time he served as editor of The Southern Literary Messenger, but heavy drinking caused him to loose the position. He successively edited two other well-known periodicals, and won respect as a critical the same time that his poems and short stories were attraction wide notice both in the U.S. and abroad. The death of his wife in 1847 was a major trauma to Poe, from which he never really recovered. He died in Baltimore in 1849, at the age of only 40.
Poe is mainly known as a poet, but he was also a short story writer. Apart from the four detective stories, Poe's reputation of being the latter rests mainly on his tales of horror. Almost all are told in the first person and in them the narrator sees or suffers some frightful experience. One well-known tale of this sort is "The Tell-Tale Heart-. The qualities that make Poe's horror stories unique in their kind are not to be found in plotting or characterization, as many critics have negatively criticized; the plots are often borrowed, and characterization does not exist here any more than in the other stories.
